[crubier]

Gitlab is a good example, we had to leave the free tier in order to get features that Gitlab specifically chose to be in the paid tier because their absence is a big blocker when you grow... So we pay $100/mo/seat on Gitlab.

We also use at least 10 paid general-purpose tools that each fill a real need (we don't keep tools we don't use):

- Notion for knowledge management

- Airtable to manage operations data (not customer data)

- Hubspot for Sales and Marketing

- Lattice for HR

- Spendesk for expenses management

- Quickbooks for accounting

- Typeform for various customer feedback

- Zoom for remote work and link between our offices

- GSuite for everything in it

- Figma for UI design

- Recruitee for recruitment management

And finally, add also at least 10 paid Engineering-specific tools:

- Gitlab of course

- AWS for hosting of course

- Cloudflare for DNS stuff

- Sentry for error reporting

- Crowdin for internationalization

- FullStory for UX studies

- Apollo engine to get decent analytics about our backend

- Webflow for our Website (Not for the webapp of course)

- Pagerduty for operations

- We used Cloudcraft at some point to have an idea how our AWS stack look like

I could go on... But in the end, you end up with ~10 Saas tools peer seat, with costs from $2 to $100 per tool. And it is valuable, we pay them because they are worth it. But yes this is an interesting trend...

[harrisonjackson]

What do you use Gitlab for at the Gold tier that you don't get at Silver? The price jump for us was just too much but we did spring for Silver after dropping self-hosted Jenkins, self-hosted npm, Jira, and Github.

You might like this issue they just merged up https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/37081

Roadmaps and single-level epics coming to Silver.